This invention relates to a method of recycling rubber tires and more particularly to a method recycling steel belted tires.
Scrap tires are an environmental problem particularly steel belted tires as the steel belts reduce their value to rubber manufacturers as a large percentage of the tire consists of steel belts encrusted in rubber, making the salvage of the rubber more difficult and expensive as the steel belts make about 10% of the tire, by weight.
The iron and steel industries can not economically use the rubber encrusted steel belts as scrap because of the high sulfur content of the rubber as the sulfur ends up in the melted iron substantially reducing the value of the iron made from such scrap.
The object of this invention is to reduce the rubber encrusting the steel belts to a minimum, melting the steel belts in a cupola and reducing the sulfur content of the melted iron to sufficiently low levels to produce a commercially valuable low sulfur iron in an environmentally acceptable process.